at the wallet under his
pillow was still there, he investigated the cause of the disturbance of
his slumbers. The noise had ceased and he decided that the overstrain of
the day had worked an hallucination. Pomeroy dropped off to sleep, but
presently was aroused by sounds which were unmistakably caused by a
gentle tapping on the window pane. Exasperated, the man arose, picked up
a boot, slipped to the window and raised it gently ready to give the
joker or would-be burglar a rousing whack on the head if within reach.
He stuck his head out of the window for a better view of the exterior
world, and his curiosity was rewarded with a stinging blow on the cheek.
The pain aroused all the Pomeroy French Huguenot fighting blood in his
veins. Viciously he swung the boot at the unseen foe, only to hear it
crash through tree branches. Laughing softly, in his enlightenment, he
reached out into the night, grasped a branch, broke it off and turned on
the gas and lit it. On the twig were two curious nuts.

Pomeroy was a lover of nature, as I learned by many an interesting talk
with him. He found time in his regular farming pursuits to study native
trees and shrubs, and had forbidden his hired men to cut down any of the
native nut trees on his 500 acre farm. But the nuts on the branch
retrieved from darkness were specimens new to him and he could hardly
wait for daylight to come to enable him to get acquainted with the tree
which had invited his attention so rudely. Next morning Pomeroy learned
that his new found arboreal friend was a Persian walnut. It was loaded
and the wind storm of the night had covered the ground with shucked and
unshucked nuts. By permission of the landlord, he gathered a peck of the
Persian walnuts, wrapped O'Connor's and his own belongings in a
newspaper and filled the carpet-bag with the nut treasures. Arriving
home, the tourists stopped first at O'Connor's house. There they had to
relate the experience of their great trip to an assemblage of the two
families. The recounting of the Centennial wonders took until midnight.
When Pomeroy picked up his carpet-bag to go home, it was empty! The
children had made a discrete retirement after having consumed the entire
peck of English walnuts, as the shells in the kitchen disclosed.
Luckily for the youngsters, they were safe in bed and asleep.

The next day, according to the elder Pomeroy, little Albert who had not
been at the O'Connor home the night before, heard the dol